From: usenet@baradel.demon.co.uk   
      
   In message , David   
   Harmon  writes   
   >On Sat, 29 Nov 2008 23:10:31 +1000 in rec.arts.sf.misc, Aqua   
   > wrote,   
   >>David Friedman wrote:   
   >>> In article ,   
   >>>  Aqua  wrote:   
   >>>> Is there anyone else who finds this faith in the power of IQ charming,   
   >>>> like a child who still believes in Santa Claus?   
   >>>   
   >>> You do remember that "patronizing" was one of the terms you applied   
   >>> pejoratively--to someone else?   
   >>   
   >>As far as I can tell, Larry Summers wasn't doing it deliberately.   
   >   
   >Are you being deliberately patronizing, or are you just too bigoted to   
   >realize you are doing it?   
   >   
   I am confident that Aqua's command of the English language is such that   
   she would only ever be patronising on purpose. Re bigoted, I think you   
   just illustrated the well known phrase that includes the nouns pot and   
   kettle and the adjective black.   
      
   The whole problem with Larry Summers assertion that women are more   
   stupid than men and thus there aren't enough bright ones to take half   
   the top positions in academia is that other factors are going to   
   overwhelm any affect caused by differences in intelligence between the   
   sexes (assuming for the moment that they really exist and aren't just an   
   artefact of the way IQ is measured).   
      
   Basically we have a pool of highly intelligent men, say Y of them and a   
   pool of highly intelligent women, lets say we have X of those. We also   
   have a number of academic science posts available, say P. Now if those   
   posts were filled in the same way grammar school places used to be   
   filled in the UK back in the "good old days", then we would rank all the   
   men and women of appropriate age in descending order of intelligence and   
   the top P of them would be given the jobs. If we then ended up with more   
   men in post than women, then it would show that there were more very   
   clever men than there were very clever women.   
      
   However....   
      
   In real life, that's not how it happens. Firstly, we're not choosing   
   from the whole pool of people, we're only choosing from those who are   
   interested in the post. A lot of the most intelligent people might not   
   have gone down the academic route and even if they did, they might not   
   have studied science. Perhaps they got bored in college because stuff   
   was too easy, did OK but not spectacularly, and went to be high flying   
   entrepreneurs. Or they were attracted to a career as an actor or   
   musician or painter or photographer. Or they were attracted to   
   philosophy and not physics. Or for whatever reason, they didn't have the   
   right qualifications. You need more than a high IQ to be an academic,   
   you need to have trodden the academic path all the way up. Many highly   
   intelligent people don't want to do that, they want to strike out in   
   different areas.   
      
   So the fact that more men end up in top academic science positions tells   
   us nothing about the intelligence of women, or indeed of men, because   
   there could be even cleverer men out there who are not interested in the   
   sort of post we're talking about. How do we know that we have the   
   cleverest people in these positions? To know that, we'd have to test   
   people in all these other walks of life.   
      
   So it all boils down to whether you believe IQ tests test anything other   
   than the ability to do well in IQ tests. Here in the UK, IQ tests have   
   been almost totally abandoned because they're not thought to test   
   anything meaningful to education or to life.   
      
   Helen   
      
   --   
   Helen, Gwynedd, Wales *** http://www.baradel.demon.co.uk   
      
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